In My Mind

Tonight on satellite radio James Taylor's Carolina In My Mind flowed into our living room. And pictures came to mind.


In one, I see myself in the basement at 6704 (that's the address-inspired nickname of the northeast Edmonton house I grew up in) listening again and again to that magnetic song. In those days, that meant lifting the needle and dropping the arm on the LP's groove, second song on side one. That line about maybe hearing the highway calling, wow. I would sit down there, lights off like in a theatre, and let that homesickness carve me.

In another picture, I am in Calgary. High school days. Jaime and I are there for a debate, I think. In a bar there's a singer with a guitar on a stool and he's singing Fire And Rain. 

 Those pictures in my mind are nothing special in themselves, I suppose. But it's more and more interesting to me that the first notes of that song somehow illuminate the images in my memory. It's kinda like looking at a Youtube page.

If you go to Alcatraz, you get a very cool audio tour of the prison, narrated in parts by different former inmates. One talked about how he escaped every day by closing his eyes and running images, home movies of a sort, in his mind.

Prisoners of all kinds find refuge in that mysterious theatre behind our eyelids.

D Block, Alcatraz

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